Day 30: I’m scared…and that’s okay.

I’m scared of a bigger company (or person smarter than me) releasing my product faster than I can and taking the market with them.

I’m scared of encountering a huge show-stopper months into development.

I’m scared of never getting any funding. (I’m trying to get enough funding to focus on this full-time. I have an idea of the expenses involved for the business, but running/developing/networking it on top of a full-time job is starting to get difficult.)

I’m scared of being unable to convince people that working with me is worth their time.

I’m scared of failure and having to restart.

I’m scared of never seeing success.

I’m scared of giving up.

What’s different about these fears from, say, my fear of riding those 400-foot free-fall rides is that this is *good* fear. The fear doesn’t immobilize me. The fear ignites me.

I still feel incredibly alive after a multi-hour coding session or coffee/pitch meeting. The implicit rejections I get (such as my landing page and social networks being mostly dormant, or that I’m still far away from an interactive demo of some kind) aren’t making me afraid of continuing; they make me think about how I can do better and push forward. Every line of code I write brings me closer to putting this out in the world, and that’s enough to silence my fears for a short while.

It has been said that there are few things in life that make a person more vulnerable than starting a business. To that, I say this: if this shit were easy, everyone would do it, and I’d still be chasing the hard stuff anyway. I’ll take a little bit of hard work for a lot of awesome later down the line over stability and safety any day of the week!